Scenes from my real-life:
Feb. 8th, 2013 01:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jack_babalonExactly one year ago I sat right in this seat, manning the keyboard all alone in the apartment. It was also my father's last night on earth. A fact I recognized as possible but only remotely so, the mathematics of the dilemma were clear, but like much of math past a certain age, it lacked any recognizable practicality to be processed fully.
Anyway, Mom and I had been trading deathwatch shifts at the hospice. There was really only room for one person to sleep. Not that you could in that place, unless you were a permanent guest, and even then only thanks to the administration of William Burrough's amount of morphine. It was my 'night' off having watched his sleep punctuated in brief outbursts of confused terror. To my regret, my shame I was relieved to get away from that horrible little white room. Back at the apartment there was a little freelance work that I knocked out on the laptop. It kept me busy most of the day and the rest was spent at the gym or buried in Murakami's 'Kafka on the Shore'.
Distinctly remember the rain-on-the-roof pattern of the text driving me to hit the page .
Also remember smoking a bowl afterwards before sitting out on the porch. Right there at the table where my father painted his final armies, complete with the view of the Terminus 'Pencil Building' and the street where O4Winos hollered at him for alms across the palisade fence. His armies were cast from lead, numbered legion and usually stood from anywhere between 15 and 25 mm tall. It was only with a wave of a sorcerer's brush (note: spelt 'blood' at first) over their ranks that they came to life. Meticulously detailed. We all like to brag of our father's accomplishments (or at least those lucky enough to be in a position to have done so), but he had won many an award for his efforts. Of course my father being my father, he refused to ever display them.
In fact, during his last days of lucidity he wanted me to just throw them out, toss them in the trash along with his volumes of historical board games and painting supplies. Of course that would just be one more request of his I had to refuse during our relatively (now much too) brief time together.
There was a dried blob of acrylic paint embedded into the glass table top. I scratched at it idly and then realized that no, it was better there, a stain only in the eye of those who did not know my father's passion and the clock maker's genius with which he applied it.
Seven hours later I would get a call from my mom rattling me out of a black-out sprawled across the couch. 'If you want to say 'goodbye' get here soon.'
My first move was to call a cab. Had a couple pulled up for such an emergency but all the lines were busy. The one I finally did reach immediately put me on hold. Ten excruciating minutes grind out before I hang up. Rush hour on a Friday, what are you going to do when you don't know how to drive a car? Frantic. Half-dazed. Scared. I bolted out of the apartment in the same outfit I had been wearing when I left the hospice.
Standing on Boulevard, overcast skies too tired to rain. Street traffic was flowing strictly from freak central and what few cabs I tried waving down were occupied or drove right on by. Invisible fucking me again. Options? MARTA? Sh'yeah. Call somebody? Call who? Everyone I know is asleep or at work or lives OTP. (note: and just now the Pandora shifts right into Eno's 'Third Uncle' - straight off the Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy LP - one of my father's favorite albums when I was a kid and he would blast it loud in our shitty Brooklyn apartment and I would pogo hop without knowing what pogo hopping was in a possessed frenzy all to his amusement so much so that he would replay the song constantly).
Finally got in a cab and spilling my story to the driver he did his best. But he wasn't from this country and had no fucking idea the geography of Emory country. Add to that the traffic at Terminus' finest. Add to that the phone ringing non-stop with mom telling me to 'hurry' and add to that my head was starting to spin.
When I finally arrived... it was too late.
He had passed roughly fifteen minutes ago.
And so it is that much like comedy, tragedy proved to be a child of the doomed relationship between intent and timing.
A year later sitting here and I know technically that according to the calendar, that this upcoming Sunday will be the 10th. Which is the date written on the simple wooden box in which his ashes rest (and rest flanked by a very dapper if not diminutive Marshall Ney along with his attendant regiment). But to me, my father passed on the first Friday of February and it matters not to my grief what number may be assigned to it.
But that's just how it works. Absence measures strange in time, making a 15mm regiment weigh as much as a field cannon and folds a year's passing neatly against the new day.
Anyway, Mom and I had been trading deathwatch shifts at the hospice. There was really only room for one person to sleep. Not that you could in that place, unless you were a permanent guest, and even then only thanks to the administration of William Burrough's amount of morphine. It was my 'night' off having watched his sleep punctuated in brief outbursts of confused terror. To my regret, my shame I was relieved to get away from that horrible little white room. Back at the apartment there was a little freelance work that I knocked out on the laptop. It kept me busy most of the day and the rest was spent at the gym or buried in Murakami's 'Kafka on the Shore'.
Distinctly remember the rain-on-the-roof pattern of the text driving me to hit the page .
Also remember smoking a bowl afterwards before sitting out on the porch. Right there at the table where my father painted his final armies, complete with the view of the Terminus 'Pencil Building' and the street where O4Winos hollered at him for alms across the palisade fence. His armies were cast from lead, numbered legion and usually stood from anywhere between 15 and 25 mm tall. It was only with a wave of a sorcerer's brush (note: spelt 'blood' at first) over their ranks that they came to life. Meticulously detailed. We all like to brag of our father's accomplishments (or at least those lucky enough to be in a position to have done so), but he had won many an award for his efforts. Of course my father being my father, he refused to ever display them.
In fact, during his last days of lucidity he wanted me to just throw them out, toss them in the trash along with his volumes of historical board games and painting supplies. Of course that would just be one more request of his I had to refuse during our relatively (now much too) brief time together.
There was a dried blob of acrylic paint embedded into the glass table top. I scratched at it idly and then realized that no, it was better there, a stain only in the eye of those who did not know my father's passion and the clock maker's genius with which he applied it.
Seven hours later I would get a call from my mom rattling me out of a black-out sprawled across the couch. 'If you want to say 'goodbye' get here soon.'
My first move was to call a cab. Had a couple pulled up for such an emergency but all the lines were busy. The one I finally did reach immediately put me on hold. Ten excruciating minutes grind out before I hang up. Rush hour on a Friday, what are you going to do when you don't know how to drive a car? Frantic. Half-dazed. Scared. I bolted out of the apartment in the same outfit I had been wearing when I left the hospice.
Standing on Boulevard, overcast skies too tired to rain. Street traffic was flowing strictly from freak central and what few cabs I tried waving down were occupied or drove right on by. Invisible fucking me again. Options? MARTA? Sh'yeah. Call somebody? Call who? Everyone I know is asleep or at work or lives OTP. (note: and just now the Pandora shifts right into Eno's 'Third Uncle' - straight off the Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy LP - one of my father's favorite albums when I was a kid and he would blast it loud in our shitty Brooklyn apartment and I would pogo hop without knowing what pogo hopping was in a possessed frenzy all to his amusement so much so that he would replay the song constantly).
Finally got in a cab and spilling my story to the driver he did his best. But he wasn't from this country and had no fucking idea the geography of Emory country. Add to that the traffic at Terminus' finest. Add to that the phone ringing non-stop with mom telling me to 'hurry' and add to that my head was starting to spin.
When I finally arrived... it was too late.
He had passed roughly fifteen minutes ago.
And so it is that much like comedy, tragedy proved to be a child of the doomed relationship between intent and timing.
A year later sitting here and I know technically that according to the calendar, that this upcoming Sunday will be the 10th. Which is the date written on the simple wooden box in which his ashes rest (and rest flanked by a very dapper if not diminutive Marshall Ney along with his attendant regiment). But to me, my father passed on the first Friday of February and it matters not to my grief what number may be assigned to it.
But that's just how it works. Absence measures strange in time, making a 15mm regiment weigh as much as a field cannon and folds a year's passing neatly against the new day.